Alexandre Calame

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Alexandre Calame
Monument of Alexandre Calame in Geneva

Alexandre Calame (born May 28, 1810 in Arabie, Corsier-sur-Vevey municipality , today part of Vevey , † March 19, 1864 in Menton ) was a Swiss painter .

Life

Calame was the son of a marble worker from Vevey. At the age of 15 he entered a banking business. In his leisure hours he began to practice drawing and coloring small views of Switzerland. In 1829 his employer, the banker Diodati, enabled him to take lessons from the landscape painter François Diday . After a few months, Calame decided to devote himself entirely to art.

From 1835 he exhibited his Swiss alpine and forest landscapes in Paris and Berlin . They quickly gained wide acclaim, especially in Germany, even though Calame was more a draftsman than a colorist. In 1838 his stay in Düsseldorf is guaranteed during a study trip. In 1842 he went to Paris and exhibited his Mont Blanc , the Jungfrau , Lake Brienz , Monte Rosa and Mont Cervin here. 1843 gave birth to his wife Amélie, a subsidiary of the Geneva painter and music teacher Jean-Baptiste Müntzberger (1794-1878), in Geneva, the son of Arthur , who should also be a painter.

In 1844 he went to Italy and brought back numerous pictures from Rome and Naples , including the ruins of Paestum , now in the city museum in Leipzig . In this he showed that he was also able to understand Italian nature in its peculiarity; but his specialty remained the alpine landscape. He drew glaciers, mountain water, trees, clouds and rocks splintered by storms with great fidelity to nature, albeit with a certain smoothness.

Memorial stone in Morschach

One of his most highly regarded works is the depiction of the four seasons and times of day in four landscapes, where the spring morning shows a southern flat landscape, the summer noon a Nordic flat landscape, the autumn evening and the winter night are patches of mountains. Calame became even more popular than these larger works through smaller works, lithographs and etchings , in particular through the 18 studies by Lauterbrunnen and Meiringen and the 24 sheets of Alpine crossings , which were widely used in France, England and Germany and are still used today as templates for the Serving drawing lessons.

In Morschach above Lake Uri , a memorial stone commemorates Alexandre Calame, who often painted his landscapes from here.

On April 3, 1880, the monument donated by his wife Amélie was inaugurated in Geneva.

gallery

Selection of works

literature

  • Eugène Rambert : Alexandre Calame, sa vie et son œuvre d'après les sources originales , Fischbacher, 1884.

Individual evidence

  1. 1880 Monument to Alexandre Calame in Geneva

Web links

Commons : Alexandre Calame  - collection of images, videos and audio files